The present invention generally relates to machine instances, and more particularly to listing optimal machine instances in a computing environment based on user context.
Software may be developed in a computing environment, such as a cloud computing environment, where virtual environments or virtual machine (VM) instances may be created and utilized in testing the software at various stages of development, and the VM instances may be adapted to various combinations of different operating systems (OS), middleware, and middleware parameters. In some cases, the number of VM instances may be difficult to track an optimal VM instance for a given project task associated with the operation and/or development of the software, and unnecessary man-hours may be expended on finding the optimal VM instance for the task or in the re-creation of a VM instance (that may be duplicative of an earlier used VM instance).
For example, in the domain of error analysis, numerous VM instances with minor differences from each other (e.g., vis-à-vis middleware versions and parameters) may be generated and may be managed. Certain naming conventions may allow a user to identify a VM instance or group of VM instances that may be suitable for a particular task. The naming convention, for example, may resemble: “owner (administrator)|OS|hostname|purpose|installed software, etc.” However, naming conventions may not be accurate due to a variety of reasons stemming from human error during the naming process for the VM instance including occurrence of a sudden event preventing the creation of a new VM instance and forcing diversion of an existing VM machine for another purpose, an internet protocol (IP) address may be diverted because other IP addresses may be unavailable, and compliance of the naming convention may be ignored, e.g., because of a time constraint. In other cases, the naming convention may contain insufficient information to identify the optimal VM instance. Still, searching a list of VM instance names may be time consuming and inefficient or may nonetheless introduce human errors during the search of the list itself, e.g., by overlooking or misreading VM instance names.